24 October 2007

My Friends in San Diego

Just as I felt when watching images of Katrina flooding a city I love, I'm shaking and sad about the fires in San Diego, where I lived for six years. And where I've visited twice in the past two years, including visits to three beautiful little farms. I'll show them here in more peaceful times, and may the prevailing winds soon shift. Wouldn't some rain be nice?

Here in Escondido: La Milpa Organica. I read over on Michael Ruhlman's blog that Chef Gavin Kaysen's main produce guy lost part of his farm. I know the farmer, Barry Logan, at La Milpa, supplies to more restaurants in the county than anyone else, and can only pray he's safe.

I will say that last night, the California Federation for Poultry sent me a press release with the unlikely subject "Truth in Labeling." It seems that Foster Farms and others who use the completely meaningless word "100% All Natural" in their pesticide-laced birds are all a-twitter at "big poultry manufacturers" injecting salt water into chickens, pumping up the weight and sodium content. Well, that's all well and good, but how about if Foster Farms, who isn't quite as despicable as Tyson, comes clean on what's in the feed that goes into those chickens, or the conditions under which they're raised?

The California Federation for Poultry did not do their homework in soliciting my support for their campaign. As one of my friends who raises pastured, truly free-range, organic chickens says, "The saltwater is not what's wrong with the chickens. The problem is pesticide drenched feed and theconfinement of the birds. To freak out about the salt injection is just silly.

"Maybe if all you've ever seen is really, really nasty cut-rate industrial chickens Foster Farms does look good by comparison, being only moderately disgusting." (Thanks, Ms. H.)

More anon on that. For now, my thoughts and prayers are with the folks in San Diego and the other folks in Southern California. I lived in Malibu for a month when our daughter was an infant, in Paradise Cove Campground. It was heaven.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: "We all have big changes in our lives that are more or less a second chance." — Harrison Ford